


one page over

by viverella



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Christmas, Christmas Party, Gen, Gift Exchange, Holidays, M/M, Post-Star Trek Beyond
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-10
Updated: 2017-01-10
Packaged: 2018-09-14 21:20:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9203600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viverella/pseuds/viverella
Summary: Leonard hosts the crew at his family's old ranch in Georgia for Christmas. Shenanigans ensue.





	

**Author's Note:**

> written for the [stnetwork](http://stnetwork.tumblr.com) gift exchange for [blue-vulcan](http://blue-vulcan.tumblr.com) over on tumblr who requested a bones-centric fic with fluffy christmas/holiday fun and crew shenanigans! now with bonus mckirk! it's a little late now for the holidays since our posting day is today, but presumably, this is the crew's first christmas post-stb and Jaylah's first introduction to some more Weird Earth Traditions™️ ! this turned out about 1000% different than I originally planned for it to be, but hope you enjoy, angel <3

_"The universe is on the page one page over." —[Nicole Brossard](http://jacket2.org/article/response-nicole-brossard)_

 

There are many things Leonard never in his life imagined he’d be doing. Spending his days aboard a starship surrounded by people who’d spent their entire lives dreaming of chasing the stars is one of them. Hosting entire crew of said ship at his family’s old ranch is another. 

In the hours leading up to the crew’s arrival, Leonard finds himself running around the house, throwing up decorations that Grammy hadn’t gotten around to setting up before he got home or else deemed superfluous while Grammy putters around the kitchen, worrying over whether there will be enough food to feed everyone and telling Jim to peel the potatoes or put a pot of water on to boil or preheat the oven. Between putting up lights all around the front porch and pinning up stockings that he swears haven’t been used since he was a teenager maybe, he finds a spare moment to wonder why it feels like such a big deal, why he feels the need to go to the nth degree to make sure that this holiday is a proper one. It’s not like his family ever cared much for the traditional roots of Christmas from all those centuries ago and they’ve never been a terribly religious family anyways. But when he looks around at the twinkling lights adorning every window in the house and the stockings by the fireplace and smells the fresh pine scent of the tree standing proudly in their living room, he thinks about being ten years old and waking up in the wee hours of the morning with his sister and their cousins to sneak downstairs to get a head start on their gifts, thinks about being cozy and safe and loved, thinks about when his family was whole, before he realized he’d probably outlive every single one of them. 

Leonard thinks about the jittery anxiety right under the surface of his skin and he thinks maybe it’s because it’s the first time the whole crew is over at his old family home and it feels a little like his worlds are colliding, and he thinks that maybe it’s because Scotty is going to pick up Jaylah from the Academy on the way over and this’ll be her first proper holiday season on Earth. He remembers his first years at the Academy, remembers how coming home the first year didn’t feel like coming home at all because it was his first time home since his father died and Jocelyn left him and the entire house felt like it was filled with ghosts, remembers how staying in San Francisco with Jim the second year felt better and warmer but no less lonely because the holidays have always meant this home and laughter and people he loves everywhere. He remembers not knowing what it meant to have a place to come home to in those early years, and he thinks about all those long years Jaylah must have spent alone on Altamid, and he thinks, well, how could he not worry. 

“Bones,” Jim calls over from the kitchen where he’s busy helping Grammy roll out some dough for pie crust. She tuts at him and sprinkles some more flour over the rolling pin so the dough won’t stick to it. “I can hear you freaking out from over here.”

Leonard frowns at the mound of garlands by his feet and the very many empty spaces around the living room and kitchen that have yet to be decorated. When Leonard was growing up, it was his and the cousins’ responsibility to help decorate the house, but the majority of his cousins are now married and have kids and families of their own, and so most of the house has remained relatively bare of decorations, save for the Christmas tree twinkling in the corner of the living room. 

“Not helping,” Leonard calls back, trying to untangle the garlands and figure out what the hell to do with them. 

In the kitchen, Grammy chuckles and Leonard hears her say to Jim, “He’s always been like this, you know. He did this when you weren’t looking the first time you came to spend Christmas with us too.”

And Jim’s heard this story before, because Grammy is nothing if not ruthless and she loves giving Leonard shit, but Jim gasps and smiles in surprise at her anyways and says, “No! Really?” 

“Mhmm,” Grammy hums and launches into a story of that first Christmas after they went to space for the first time, when Leonard first brought Jim home for the holidays, and Jim nods and laughs at the expected intervals that he’s got to know by heart now and meets Leonard’s eyes from across the room and winks. Leonard feels something warm rise up in his chest and he ducks his chin to hide the grin that’s spreading across his own face. 

There’s a knock on the door when Grammy’s about halfway through her story, and she calls out for Leonard to get it because she and Jim are busy in the kitchen, and Jim calls out something about Leonard actually doing something useful, light and lilting, and Leonard throws a stray ornament at Jim as he walks past the kitchen on his way to the front door. The stuffed felt angel hits Jim on the shoulder and makes him laugh and drop the rolling pin he’s holding, which makes Grammy gasp and scold him ( _Leonard Horatio McCoy!_ ), and Leonard just grins, bright eyed, because it’s nowhere near as bad as what Leonard and his cousins used to get up to when they were kids, but Grammy will act like it’s the end of the world anyways. 

Uhura and Spock arrive first, bearing a bottle of wine and a traditional Vulcan dish, Uhura pressing a gentle kiss to Leonard’s cheek and Spock’s posture uncharacteristically loose and relaxed. Hikaru arrives next with Ben and Demora in tow, and as Leonard crouches to greet Demora, he feels something ache in his chest, knowing that he won’t be able to see his own daughter until after New Year’s since Jocelyn took them off-world for the holidays. He lets Demora put a Santa hat on his head to match hers and promises her that he’ll take her out to see the horses in their stables later. Pavel and Scotty arrive some time later, each bearing gifts of copious amounts of alcohol, and with Jaylah trailing not too far behind, looking somewhere between delighted at the colorful, twinkling decorations that Leonard’s managed to put up and bewildered at the spectacle of it all. 

As Pavel and Scotty breeze by Leonard after making a show of presenting their offerings, Jaylah blinks owlishly at the house around them. Leonard wonders idly if she’s ever seen anything like this before, having gone from living for years out of the _Franklin_ straight to bright and shiny Yorktown to slick San Francisco and the Academy. He wonders, sometimes, what her homeworld was like, but she doesn’t really bring it up, and he’s not sure it’s his place to ask. 

“Montgomery Scotty tells me that I should bring food to a holiday party,” Jaylah says, holding out a dish of something purple and slightly charred that Leonard guesses is a vegetable of some sort. 

Leonard laughs and takes it from her, saying, “Rule of thumb for most parties is the more food the better, darlin’.”

“Jaylah!” Jim cheers, bounding over from the kitchen, freshly apron-less and presumably released from kitchen duties for the time being. He pulls her into a warm hug and presses a light kiss to the top of her head. 

Sometimes, Leonard thinks about how much of himself Jim must see in Jaylah, and he feels something warm and light bloom in his chest as he watches Jim pull a Santa hat onto her head and declare her officially ready for her first Earth Christmas. And as Leonard goes to set down the food Jaylah brought in the kitchen next to the whiskey and bourbon that Scotty and Pavel brought and the gingerbread cookies the Sulus made and the wine and snacks that Uhura and Spock brought, he looks out at the living room, where everyone’s catching up and laughing and shouting over each other already in between putting the gifts for their gift exchange under the freshly decorated tree, Leonard thinks _okay_ , thinks _I might actually pull this off_. 

\---

It’s probably something they should all have anticipated, but explaining the logic of a game like white elephant to Jaylah turns out to be quite the task. Really, Leonard thinks, a game like this would probably make more sense once they start playing because between being allowed to steal each other’s gifts and the various nitpicky restrictions on stealing there are too many moving pieces, but Jim gets caught up in making Jaylah understand everything about it first and he’s so insistent that Leonard doesn’t have it in him to stop him. 

“It is _my_ present,” she keeps saying, “Why can someone take it?”

And Jim keeps saying back, “It’s a game. That’s the point.”

And they go in circles like that for a good ten minutes before Spock interjects and says something along the lines of how the entire game is illogical and while it’s admirable that Jaylah’s trying to make sense of it all, it’s easier to just accept the rules and move on. Uhura laughs then and brings up that time they played white elephant for one of the Christmases they spent on board the _Enterprise_ and Spock turned out to be the most competitive of all of them about it all. Spock clears his throat and claims amnesia. And at that point, Leonard doesn’t even care what present he gets stuck with because this is probably the best thing to happen to him all week. 

\---

“Oi!” Scotty calls over to Jaylah later as everyone is gathering to help themselves to food for dinner. 

They’ve emerged from white elephant with friendships intact (though there was some fairly intense fighting over the novelty mug that says _it was Jim’s fault_ on it and a lot of Jim looking affronted at the popularity of the item), and food and drinks have been set out to cover almost every inch of the dining table, so much so that the table is all but impossible to actually eat at, and Leonard scrambles to clear out the living room space of gift debris so there’s actually enough room for people to sit and eat again. 

“You and me, lassie,” Scotty announces, “Tonight, we’re going drink for drink.”

Jaylah pauses in helping herself to the mac and cheese that Grammy insisted she try ( _McCoy secret family recipe_ she’d said, patting Jaylah on the arm and already scooping food onto Jaylah’s plate) and squints at Scotty. “What is drink for drink?” she asks. 

“You have to drink every time he does,” Jim says around a laugh, throwing an arm around Jaylah’s shoulders. 

Her eyes light up then with something mischievous and delighted, and she says with a smirk pulling at the corners of her mouth, “Oh. Good. I will win, then.”

Jim laughs and Pavel makes a soft _oooh_ sound, and Scotty just sputters, stuck halfway between arguing that it’s not actually a competition that involves _winning_ per se and pointing out that no one’s been able to outdrink him yet. And Jaylah just grins and takes a cup of eggnog from Pavel, who insists that she try some in the name of having a proper Christmas experience. 

“You’re going to scare her off,” Uhura laughs. “That stuff’s nasty.”

Pavel scoffs. “Um, eggnog is amazing,” he says, sounding affronted. “And it’s an essential part of the Christmas experience.”

“He’s right,” Hikaru chimes in from across the table from where he’s spooning potatoes onto Demora’s plate. And then he smirks and says to Jaylah, “You’ll probably hate it, but that’s part of the Christmas experience too.”

Pavel gasps, and Jaylah frowns at her drink before sniffing her drink skeptically. She takes a hesitant sip and immediately spits it back out into the cup, sticking her tongue out and scrunching up her face in disgust. Hikaru and Uhura cheer, high-fiving each other, and Pavel promptly declares all of them dead to him, and Leonard watches the whole exchange feeling like his chest is so full it could burst. He goes to trade Jaylah’s eggnog with a cup of Grammy’s famous hot spiced cider and promises she’ll like that better. She does, and he grins, satisfied, and goes to dump out her rejected eggnog in the kitchen sink.

Leonard lingers in the kitchen after rinsing out the cup and watches as the others gather food onto their plates and wander into the living room to pile on and around the couches, and he wonders, absently, if there will be enough food. He fusses around with some of the extra plates of food and wonders if he should bring some more out in case anyone wants seconds, and behind him, he hears a floorboard creak. When he looks up, Jim is ducking into the kitchen, a soft smile on his face. Leonard smiles back and lets Jim come over to him, let Jim ease down his restless hands and pull him away from the busywork he’s gotten himself into. Leonard stills and tries to let something like peace settle over him. 

“You don’t have to worry so much, you know,” Jim says, so gentle and so quiet that Leonard thinks that if Jim had been like this, all those years ago their first holiday season at the Academy, Leonard probably wouldn’t have recognized him. “Everyone’s having a great time.”

Leonard smiles. “I know,” he says, unable to quite describe what the flutter of anxiety is deep inside his chest. 

Jim lifts his hands to cradle Leonard’s face in his hands. “You deserve to too,” he says. He frowns a little then and says, softer now, “What’s wrong?”

Leonard opens his mouth to answer and finds that, for a moment, the words don’t quite come, because these are fears (and not real fears, per se, not like the fears he harbors, still, about the great black expanse of space they tend to call home these days, but fears nonetheless) that he’s never quite voiced before. He takes a deep breath and tries again. 

“Remember when we were at the Academy?” Leonard says and he lets a hand settle around Jim’s hip and slips a finger through one of the belt loops on Jim’s jeans. Jim hums softly and pushes Leonard’s hair back. Leonard leans into the touch and continues, “That first year was so hard, especially around Christmas. Do you remember that?”

Jim laughs. “Yeah, I spent that Christmas drinking alone,” he says, and they can joke about it now, but Leonard remembers coming back to San Francisco before the new year and seeing the hollowness in Jim’s eyes in the moments before Jim covered it all up with a bright smile, and Leonard still hurts, sometimes, knowing that Jim was ever that person, knowing that he was probably no better himself. 

“I spent that Christmas surrounded by people,” Leonard says quietly, like the words are delicate things. “And it was one of the loneliest experiences of my life.”

Jim stares at Leonard for a long moment like Leonard is something precious and rare, and he turns to look out at the living room, where it looks like Ben is trying to stop Jaylah from giving Demora an impromptu knife throwing lesson with a butter knife and he’s trying to get Hikaru to help him, but Hikaru is laughing too hard to be of any use at all. 

Jim looks back at Leonard and says again, “Everyone’s having a great time. You could literally do nothing else tonight, and everyone would still be having a great time. It’s not going to be like when we were in the Academy for her, or for any of us anymore.”

And somewhere deep down, Leonard knows that this is true too, that all of them now have something that Leonard never expected or asked for out of the world. He’s never said it aloud before but when he thinks of his family these days, these are the people he thinks of, and part of him knows that for all of Jaylah’s losses, having this will help the world seem a little less empty.

“No worrying,” Jim says, tugging gently on the end of the Santa hat Leonard is still wearing, and it’s more like checking in than anything, _are you okay_ floating somewhere between the syllables. 

Leonard nods and presses his mouth to Jim’s. “No worrying,” he agrees, and they probably both know it’s an impossible promise, because Leonard is a caretaker through and through and the worry is ingrained in him as much as anything, but Leonard lets Jim grab them each a cup of cider and lead them back out to the party to join the others.

\---

The whole kissing under the mistletoe thing isn’t any easier to explain to Jaylah, but by that point, it’s late in the night and enough of them are drunk enough that it turns out to be pretty fun anyways. There’s a lot of shouting and people volunteering other people to demonstrate and overly descriptive hand gestures, and there’s a lot of too-loud shushing of each other and someone hisses _you’re going to wake the baby_ because Demora’s already upstairs and asleep. Later, Leonard isn’t sure who says it, but it makes Hikaru start spontaneously drunk crying over how big she’s getting and how she’s no longer a baby but she’s always going to be a baby to him. They’re happy tears, mostly, and Ben laughs and pulls Hikaru to his chest, and thankfully, somehow, Demora sleeps soundly through all of the commotion. And Leonard laughs and laughs and laughs until his stomach hurts and his eyes are watering and he thinks, okay, yeah, maybe he didn’t have to worry so much about this being a good time in the first place. 

\---

The next morning, Christmas morning, feels soft and quiet after the boisterous party the night before. Leonard wakes in intervals, taking in the hush of the morning around him, the weak winter light filtering through his curtains, the quiet in and out of Jim breathing next to him. Downstairs, he hears childish squealing that must be Demora opening her presents, and Leonard has a moment of silent thankfulness that he’d had his wits about him enough the night before to paw through Hikaru and Ben’s bags to find Demora’s presents, and even though it took all three of them to set them up nicely under the tree, considering how happy she sounds, Leonard thinks it’s all worth it. 

Next to him, Jim stirs a little and rolls over to curl himself around Leonard, pressing a sleepy kiss to Leonard’s shoulder. Leonard smiles and runs his fingers through Jim’s sleep-mussed hair, lets his fingers trail down over Jim’s freckled shoulders and down his back. Jim lets out a soft sigh and lets his eyes blink open. 

“Morning,” Leonard says softly, unable to stop the smile that spreads across his face. 

The corners of Jim’s mouth pull up, and he blinks drowsily at Leonard, lazy and warm and soft. “Morning,” he mumbles, pressing his face into Leonard’s shoulder. 

Leonard lets his fingers wander over Jim’s back and trace out patterns in Jim’s freckles he’s memorized by now, little constellations he’s found in the universe on Jim’s skin. Hercules. Cassiopeia. Pegasus. He thinks about how many mornings he’s woken up to this – those last months at the Academy after the threat of the end of the world sent them finally crashing into each other, the many days all across the universe in the captain’s quarters of the _Enterprise_ , or in the various slick apartments at Starfleet’s many space stations they’ve stopped at along their way to find the edge of everything – and he thinks about how many times he’s thought about how lucky he is to have dodged so many threats so many times, to have found a little space to call theirs despite everything the universe has to throw at them. Leonard thinks about the people they were, all those years ago in that shuttle in Riverside, and he thinks that the Jim he knows and loves now is probably one of the softest, kindest people he knows, nothing like the punch-drunk kid with a chip on his shoulder he’d first met and yet still that person, only gentler and more hopeful and a lot less bitter, and Leonard feels something warm and expansive swell in his chest. 

Later, as everyone starts to wake and wander downstairs, Leonard will roust Jim to follow the creaking floorboards down to the living room where everyone will have gathered. Later, Grammy will offer everyone tea or coffee or hot cocoa and enlist Leonard and Jim to help her get everyone fed. Later, they’ll all sit down and open the presents that Leonard helped Jim pick out for all of them a week ago, and Pavel will comment on how it’s not real Christmas if there aren’t mountains of snow outside, and Jim will roll his eyes and demand to know why anyone would subject themselves to freezing temperatures when it’s perfectly warm inside, and Leonard will wonder how he could’ve ever thought that this holiday, with all of the people he loves, could ever have gone badly.

But for now, Jim nudges his nose against Leonard’s jaw and Leonard rolls over to face Jim so he can tip Jim’s face up into his for a kiss. Leonard feels Jim smile against his mouth and lets Jim tug him closer and kiss him and kiss him and kiss him until Jim’s cheeks are slightly flushed.

“Hey, Bones?” Jim mumbles in between peppering Leonard’s skin with kisses. 

“Hmm?” Leonard hums, running his hands down Jim’s back.

Jim pulls away just enough to look Leonard in the eye and Leonard is struck, not for the first time, by how blue Jim’s eyes are. He wonders if it’ll ever be something he’s not stunned by. 

“I love you,” Jim says, and in the insulated quiet of the bedroom, the two of them buried still under several blankets with nothing hanging over them to do today, it sounds a like a promise, like _I will never leave you_ or _you will always be worth it_. 

Leonard smiles, the kind of smile that pulls his mouth wide and makes his eyes crinkle at the corners, the kind of smile that all those years ago when they first met, he didn’t think he had in him anymore. There are times, Leonard thinks, that being with Jim means believing that almost anything is possible. 

“I love you, too,” Leonard says.

And it’s probably one of the best Christmases Leonard has ever had, in the end.

**Author's Note:**

> in case anyone is unfamiliar, [white elephant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_elephant_gift_exchange) is a truly ridiculous gift exchange game in which you can steal other people's gifts and it's a delight. also may destroy friendships but that's besides the point. 
> 
> thank you for reading! kudos and comments are very much appreciated! 
> 
> come find me on [tumblr](http://leosmccoy.tumblr.com) if you're so inclined!


End file.
